Zoooom! Fastest Babies on Land

My job is awesome...I get to see these little monsters every day. On July 13, 2014, Addison the African cheetah gave birth to four cubs at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park. The cubs weighed one to two pounds each at birth, but now at four months old, they each weigh 16-18 pounds. A full-grown female cheetah will weigh 84 pounds, and an adult male will weigh up to 143 pounds, so these youngsters still have a lot of growing to do.

Addison is a first-time mom. In the wild, female cheetahs are solitary and only interact with other cheetahs during mating. Female cheetahs are attracted to males by the male's stutter-bark. At the Safari Park Cheetah Breeding Center Coalition, one of the males has a particularly sexy bark. His bark was recorded and is played to all the female cheetahs in estrus to induce breeding. It worked on Addison!

Ruuxa (cheetah) and Raina (Rhodesian ridgeback).
Photo and video courtesy of SDZG.

In the wild, cheetahs give birth to a litter of one to six cubs after a three-month gestation. Cheetah cubs have a 70% mortality rate in the first year, due to predation, disease, and starvation. So if a female cheetah has a small litter, she will often reject the cubs and try again next year. At the Park, these rejected cubs are hand-raised by behaviorists to become cheetah ambassadors for Cheetah Run. The hand-raised cubs are paired with dog companions to decrease their stress levels around humans. The dogs become their litter mates: they eat, sleep, and play with the dog, and most importantly, take behavioral cues from the dog.

As a result of this high rejection rate, Addison is the first cheetah to raise her own cubs at the Safari Park in 14 years. She is an excellent mom to her two male cubs, Wgasa and Refu, and her two female cubs, Pumzika and Mahala. All four cubs were named after former Safari Park attractions. The cubs are still nursing but are also starting to eat a raw-meat diet. In the wild, Addison would begin teaching her cubs to hunt around this age. The cubs will stay with Mom for one to two years.

Cheetahs are classified as a "vulnerable" species by the IUCN Red List. In 1900, there were about 100,000 cheetahs living in Africa and Iran; now there are only 10,000. Ten percent of the world's remaining cheetahs live in zoos. Cheetahs' major threats are habitat loss and conflict with farmers. Due to over-hunting, cheetah prey is disappearing, so they eat livestock, and are then shot by farmers as agricultural pests.

San Diego Zoo Global has been breeding cheetahs for over 40 years, and has produced over 130 cubs. SDZG and eight other organizations participating in the breeding program are creating a sustainable captive population so that this incredible species does not go extinct.

Today, the Safari Park's four cubs spent the early morning chasing each other around their exhibit. This is no small feat. As the fastest land animal in the world, these cheetahs will eventually run 70 miles per hour, accelerating from 0 to 60 miles per hour in 3 seconds. An adult cheetah can cover 20 feet of ground in one stride. The cubs aren't quite there yet, but Addison chirps and nickers to them when they stray too far. The nickering sounds foreign--almost like one of the aliens chattering in Star Wars. Today the cubs were also playing king of the mountain, climbing on logs and rocks. Two cubs even climbed high into trees! Don't these cubs know they are cheetahs, not leopards? Looks like Addison still has a lot of teaching to do!